SR GCE Portfolio

Hello and welcome to my last action project for my STEAM course, Frontiers. For this action project, we decided to take a look at grand challenges within space exploration and reveal some solutions. Throughout this unit, we took a deep look into constellations and how they affect the earth, how astronomers made an impact on how we look at the world that we live in, and much more! For this specific action project, I decided to research the Grand Challenge: Space Health and Medicine. This challenge caught my attention because without bringing attention to the health of astronauts and space travelers, space exploration probably wouldn't be as accessible. We created a poster format to identify these issues and ways we are able to resolve them. Here it is! As I close off this final action project of my senior year, I am happy yet so very sad to finish my time here at GCE. From action project to action project, we have done so more many unique and things here at GCE. These aren't jus...

 Hello and welcome to the last STEAM term of my senior class, Frontiers. For this action project, we looked into eight grand challenges that our marine ecosystems have been facing. Along with that, we asked to assemble a literature review to dive deeper into one of the challenges that were listed with the eight grand challenges. I decided to tackle the challenge of restoration and how we are able to recover our dying ecosystem structure through restoration. I wanted to focus on this challenge because I think that it is our responsibility as humans to take care of our ecosystems, especially if we are the ones affecting them. By addressing restoration it can also address the challenge of restoring our dying ecosystems, which can also lead to evolutionary approaches for future benefits involving biodiversity. Here is my literature review and I hope you enjoy it!                              ...

Hello and welcome to my second action project for my class, Endurance! For this course we have been learning about what endurance means and how can we are able to apply this skill to our lives. For this action project we dedicated twelve hours of our time on something that we care about. I decided to utilize this time to continue to work on my Christian clothing brand that I have been working on for a while now. I decided to dedicate twelve hours to actually print out the designs that are in my first collection to prepare for the clothing brand's launch date, June 4th. I developed and a created a vlog that captured my journey throughout this whole experience. Throughout this process, I had to leave to the store, do some budgeting, manage my time wisely, communicate with others, and reach my goal to bring Refined Apparel's mission to life! While going through this journey I kept thinking back to our discussions in class. Throughout this course, we read the book, Night by Elie W...

Hello and welcome to the final class of my senior year at GCE Lab School! This class is called Endurance, and it is all about enduring hardships and trials and how that exactly looks like. In this class, we have been focusing on what our life missions look like and how our lives will change after high school. Through this unit, we have been reading the book  Night  by Elie Wiesel. We dove into what both, physical and mental endurance looks like and means. While reading this book, we have been connecting it to our lives and how we are able to relate to it one way or another. For this action project, we were assigned the task to write an autobiography! We wrote our autobiographies as if we were fifty-five years old and looking back at everything that we have gone through. We had to include the mental and physical challenges that we have had to endure throughout our lives, which has made us the people that we are today. Here's my autobiography and I hope you enjoy it!

Welcome to my action project for my winter independent study! For this independent study, I decided to pursue an idea of mine that I have been wanting to bring to life in the summer of 2020. For this independent study, I chose to create a Christian clothing brand called, Refined Apparel. My faith is super important to me and is something that I have battled and struggled with, but 2020 opened my eyes to so many things and I found myself growing my relationship with God! I am in love with designing, art, and fashion so I decided why not collide the two and spread the glory of God to others. Throughout this independent study, I have been designing the first collection of Refined Apparel and really dived deeper into what this clothing brand actually means. For more information about the process of starting up this business, read down below. I hope you enjoy it! 

Welcome to the final Action project of my senior STEAM class, Social Entrepreneurship. For this unit, we dove in deeper on how we are able to grow our business. For example, marketing strategies, focusing on our targeted audience, how to reach customers, legal structure, etc. For this unit's field experience guest, we welcomed Matt Nicklin into our classroom. Mr. Nicklin is from First Analysis and spoke to us about investments and gave us advice when starting out a business. It was a super interesting and intriguing experience! For this action project, we were assigned the task to create our own business plan and to come up with a social business! Before taking this class, I have had experience with starting my own business so I was super excited to implement my new business into the picture. I decided to take the opportunity to design and sell clothing, surrounding the Christian faith! You can read all more about exactly what is brand of mine is about down below. I hope you enjoy ...

 Welcome to my last action project of this term for my class called, Equality. For this unit, we took a deeper look at the things that we believe and that could change for the best in our society. We were looking at inequality, specifically, in class, gender, and race. As a female and someone who comes from a predominately female family, I have seen and have experienced different types of inequality often. For this action project, I chose to focus on inequality in the education system for females. We were assigned to create a time capsule and look in 2119 and identify what would be going on, surrounding the type of inequality that we chose. We had to answer questions like, "what would society look like at this time? How would your inequality look like in 100 years from now?" etc. I decided to focus on inequality in the education system for females because a lot of the time women feel like they are silenced when trying to speak up in the classroom and seeking higher education....

Welcome to my first action project for the third term of my senior STEAM class, Social Entrepreneurship.  I've been looking forward to this class ever since my junior year at GCE Lab School! For this unit, we have been directing our focus on how psychology is associated with entrepreneurship and what that specifically looks like? We got to learn about different personality traits and how people interact with others. In class, we decided to test out personality tests for ourselves and take a close look at them. This allowed us to understand what these traits mean and they are used in different situations. For this unit, we had the privilege to meet with entrepreneur, Maren Rosenberg, the founder of Escape Artistry. We were fortunate enough to hear her story and also ask her questions about entrepreneurship and a little more about what she does! For this action project, we were asked to create an improvement plan for our school, GCE. We had to assemble psychological research and data...

Hello and welcome to this three-week course that I have taken called A Show of Hands! I would have never thought that I would get the opportunity to take a puppetry class, but here I am with my completed blog post filled with everything that we have learned and completed. You may be wondering what did this puppetry class consist of? I found this class to be super interesting because of the perspective that we used when learning about puppetry. This course focused on the different cultural and historical aspects of puppetry and how we can manipulate puppets to convey a message. For the first week, we were learning about the different types of puppetry. The first type of puppetry that we had looked at was called Bunraku, and this took us into a deeper dive into what types of puppetries are out there. We looked into the more cultural, impactful, and historical side of each type by presenting and listening to each other’s research. The different types of puppetries that we had studied were...

Hello and welcome to the first independent study for my senior year! For this term, I wanted to finally launch my website on my Instagram and take further steps to finalize this huge project! Throughout this journey, I was able to learn and adapt to new things such as posting continuously on social media, designing, setting up my own website, and launching a giveaway. This has been something that I am super passionate and excited about ever since my junior year. If you want to, check out my more in-depth process of creating everything on my previous blog about each step I took getting here! Here is a montage of my journey and a little bit of what the behind-the-scenes of this term looked like. I hope you enjoy it! When first going through this process of creating R O M A N A R T I wanted to carry consistency within social media. I use social media as my source of connection with viewers so I wanted to make sure that I was using it to the best of my ability. I laid out a plan for me ...

For this final Action Project for our class, Computer Science we decided to look more into "If-statements" as a whole and how we are able to use them when coding. While learning about "If-elif-else statements" we decided to complete some assignments to practice these new concepts. For this Action Project, we decided to implement these ideas and practices into this project. We were asked to become chatbots and create a code that will communicate with the user. Before doing this action project we were able to play around with a chatbot that was already made. With this, we were able to receive a better approach when creating our own. I decided to go in the direction of just asking pretty common questions and then revolving it around the topic of school. I wanted to do this because I wanted the coding to sound like an actual conversation with the user, where they can actually feel like they are talking to someone. After finally completing my chatbot I was super excited...

Hello and, welcome to my second action project for my Humanities class called Journalism. For this unit, we have looked into the question, “What is Photojournalism.” I was super stoked to dive into this unit because I absolutely love photography, and there are a lot of photographers in my family. We learned the ins and outs of photography, along with how a photo can create a large impact on a story! We studied the job of Photojournalists and how they capture/document stories and issues that are occurring today. A great example is Sebastiao Salgado, he focuses on climate change and other issues as well. For this action project, we were asked to become Photojournalists and ask someone in our lives, “What is the meaning of life?” While doing so we were also focusing on the mechanics of photography as well. I hope you enjoy this action project of mine as much as I did! SR. LivingSelflessly.2020 This is Jennifer. Jennifer is a Youth Pastor and a worship singer located here in Chicago. I dec...

 Welcome to my first Action Project for my first senior class, Economics! For this first unit, we have learned and studied a lot of different economic terms. For example, opportunity cost, supply and demand, incentives, etc. These special terms are prominent in Econ and provide great importance. We then dove straight into math concepts, that are super interesting to discover that are also very valued in the Economic world such as compounding interest, matrices, etc. We have used these concepts and terms in our action project and can really use these new and distinguishable ideas in the real world. Especially, when it comes down to thinking about your career! That's exactly what we did for this action project. Here's a video for more explanation of what else you will be discovering through this blog:   When I look into the future I see myself as an aspiring Art Director and entrepreneur surrounded by innovators, scholars, and intellectual thinkers. When choosing my career and...

In this unit of Computer Science, we dove deeper into Python and the programming language. We were able to take the skills that we learned from unit one, and really apply our knowledge of coding to websites like trinket.io and Codeskulptor. By doing so we were able to practice and get a better understanding of how to use coding and the importance it carries. Using these techniques were especially important and useful for our action project. For this unit's action project, we were proposed to create a Python code calculator, focused on a math concept that we have gone over in our Economics class. I chose to code compounding interest for users to have an easier and quicker time when compounding interest. We then were assigned to produce a letter, conducting questions that would be able to be used in our current Journalism class. This specific letter is directed to an alderman or representative. It's used in a "Madlibs" style for students to have a smoother time conducti...

Welcome to my first action project for my Senior Humanities class, Journalism! In this unit of Journalism, we have been learning about what it looks like for journalists and the in-depth process/skills that are necessary for this profession. Throughout, this unit we also read the book called Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. We received a better understanding of some do's and don'ts when interviewing while reading Our America. While collecting these strategies, we also had the privilege to attend some virtual Northwestern University panel. Within these panels, we identified what makes an effective journalist. For this action project we had two options, and I chose to choose a topic that I'm passionate about, and make a report on it. I decided to focus on Hurricane Maria, and how Trump considered selling the island, after the tragic natural disaster. Here is the report I made!   President Donald Trump considered sellin...

For this last term of Policy we talked more about the three branches of the U.S government, and how Policy comes into play with them. For each term we looked into legislative branch, executive, and judicial. We have been looking at how the way the branches run from the past, and how it is being ran now. This completely changed especially with the current events that are happening across the nation. For this action project we were able to do a creative action project where we choose what we are able to do. I chose to take what we have been learning in class, and take what is currently happening in our society today. I specifically, wanted to conduct a research paper where I take a look at what the Executive branch is doing with our current national crisis. I wanted to do this because I believe it is important to continue educating myself in this current issues, and to dive into it because it is history that we are all currently living. Sources: 1) Sofia Lotto Persi.Trump De...

For this final term of STEAM for the year, we focused on how we are able to reconstruct the city. We dove into the deeper meaning of a better city, and what that exactly looks like. Throughout this unit, we had watched a series of TED Talks speaking upon the importance of community, architecture, and a number of other things that are necessary to create a successful city for the citizens who live in it. These TED Talks also spoke about the "laziness" and inequality that can be found in many cities, suburbs, and minority neighborhoods/areas. By watching and deeply understanding these TED Talks we decided to become designers ourselves! I was able to pick any area around the world where we were able to redesign and make changes in the space. I focused on where I live, and the changes that I would personally like to better the area as a whole. To conclude, this was a very interesting and creative action project. I was able to find the importance and meaning of what creat...

For this independent study, I was able to spend some time on something that I’ve been wanting to do for the longest time, which is being able to finally sell my art. My first goal was to be able to share my art and work as a young artist, which is what I would usually see artists do a lot on social media, online shops, etc. But as I was able to finally start with an art shop business. I wanted it not to be only me just selling my artwork. When going into this I hadn’t even thought about that aspect, and opinions on doing something like this. That’s why I wanted to create, R O M A N A R T. By creating my own brand, I don’t just want to be able to sell my work on various amounts of merchandise, but I want to be able to create a community and relationships through this outlet that I am creating. I want to be able to share my work that will inspire creators of all ages to start creating! I personally consider the word creator as a totally diverse and universal term that everyone has the ...

In this second unit of Urban Planning we dove deeper into the use and innovations of electricity. We first started by learning about the history of electricity, and how it came to be! The earliest time that electricity was being utilized was when the "War of Currents" had occurred this involved Nicholas Tesla and Thomas Edison in making the type of current, Direct Current (DC) or Alternating Current (AC). We then learned about circuits, and how they are used and what each function does. Circuits include resistance, power, switches, batteries, motors, etc. We then learned how to draw each source on a circuit diagram, and what the units are for each component. For this action project we decided to utilize our circuits by applying what we know to make an energy efficient device. I decided to create an electric car that solely uses solar power energy to power the lights of the car. Lights in general take up a lot of energy, and I wanted to dive deeper on how much light and energy...